The Venerable Bede, hard at work

The first name I thought of for my Day of the Dead wreath was The Venerable Bede, author of  The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, who died in 782. He began the book by asking for his readers to pray for his soul. It gave me a little shock, reading that humble request, as I rushed through my assignment for an Old English class. Bede is a hero to me for being a scholar in eighth century England, then a remote part of the Christian world, for carefully listing his sources, and for preserving so much detail about the times, especially the two centuries  following Augustine of Canterbury’s arrival as a missionary in 597.

Who are your illustrious dead?

José Pepe Martínez, composer and violinist, singing with Steven Sandoval

From an article on www.29-95.com by Everett Evans, theater reviewer for the Houston Chronicle

Two musical traditions with avid international followings will get together when Houston Grand Opera, Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán and Talento Bilingue de Houston collaborate on the world premiere of the first mariachi opera.

To Cross the Face of the Moon/Cruzar la Cara de la Luna will premiere with a concert staging Nov. 13 at Wortham Center, featuring Mariachi Vargas, the pre-eminent mariachi ensemble, in its only 2010 Houston performance.

Four fully staged performances will follow Dec. 3-5 at Talento Bilingue, Houston’s multi-disciplinary Latino cultural arts center, with the same HGO vocal cast, but with a different mariachi ensemble from Texas.

“We are proud to combine efforts with HGO to bring a world-class performance for a multi-diverse and multi-cultural audience to the heart of Houston’s East end,” says Juan Esquivel, President and CEO of Talento Bilingüe de Houston. “This event marries the magic of culture and song in a premiere stage engagement celebrating Houston’s Latin community.”

Read more, including quotes from José Pepe Martínez who wrote the music and Leonard Foglia who wrote the book and the lyrics.

See José “Pepe” Martínez y el Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, playing and singing “Volver, Volver” in Japan in August 2007 .  What a charming performance!

The Genie at the Heart of the Reasoning Mind

Reasoning Mind is a recent graduate of the Houston Technology Center, which Forbes Magazine included in a handful of technology incubators making things happen for companies with innovations that might make a difference.

Alexander R. Khachatryan and his wife Julia founded Reasoning Mind to transform the teaching of mathematics in U. S. elementary and middle schools. Having emigrated from Russia, they were familiar with the successful mathematics curriculum used there, which China and several other Asian countries have successfully adopted.

Their son George’s dispiriting school experiences left him bored and them dismayed. They supplemented his learning, and at 16 he helped in the innovative process that led to a highly interactive and individualized curriculum, developed by a team of Russian programmers, but creatively designed for American elementary and middle school students. Reasoning Mind delivers the highly individualized curriculumon  each student’s computer via internet. One of the main ingredients of the program’s rigidly tested success is an animated character, the Genie.

The Genie explains theory, poses problems at the student’s current level, explains why answers are right, explains why answers are wrong, cheerfully urges the student to keep working hard, expresses delight, and awards points that buy prizes.

To dig into the RM story and methodology, take a look at two movies on the Reasoning Mind site that show clips from the system and interviews with students, teachers, principals, experts, and an key sponsor. I really liked to see the children’s faces light up when they talked about the Genie and hearing them say they liked the method more even though they had to work much harder.

My prediction is that Reasoning Mind will continue to get the powerful sponsorship it needs to get their system widely adopted from many contributors, including U. S. companies that need minds trained in solving hard problems. Then we’ll see the adults who as children worked through pounds of SRA packets, learning little, demand a system that works to challenge their minds.

The Genie graphic is a cropped screen capture from one of the RM movies I’ve recommended.

Ali Hanyaloglu knows Acrobat

Ali Hanyaloglu is an Adobe Acrobat evanglist I’ve had the pleasure of seeing in action at Adobe events. He has a gift I greatly prize, the gift of clarity.

You can find his brief tutorial on adding comments to video embedded in an Acrobat document on the Adobe Video Workshop listing. Just choose Acrobat 9 Family and find it on the list. This is just one example of the resources, some basic and some advanced, that you can find poking around on the Adobe site.

I was surprised at first at the idea that one would comment on a video embedded in a PDF. But as Ali went through and made a comment and a mark up, I realized that corporate videos for a promo PDF they expect to be downloaded might start off as a video rough draft  and then tweaked until it’s just right. It might also have to go through a series of approvals.

How convenient to have Acrobat add a precise time stamp to the sticky note for you, to be able to scrub through to the next item you want to tag, and to get the familiar and convenient list of comments at the bottom of the page, again with the time stamp noted.

David Place recommended a different font for our printed correspondence, Adobe Garamond Pro. It’s the beautiful serif font above.

I also learned that the logo image and my signature image aren’t sharp enough for print via InDesign. Fortunately, I do have a higher-res version of our logo, and I have vowed to write a big beautiful signature and take it to be scanned. My 3-in-1 printer does a good job printing and copying, but it balks at scanning.

David taught me how to make two different master pages, and showed me several times how to tell if I was choosing a page or a Master page. He also figured out what had been going wrong when I tried to add text. I now do columns.  And I’ve escaped from an endless loop of doing things “logically.”

Today’s wisdom: What I learned using other desktop publishing tools is a hindrance as well as a help. I have to forget what I think I know in order to learn to do things the InDesign way.

Click here to see David Place’s profile.